week 13 BONUS ENTRY: a behind-the-scenes look at failure... always-inevitable failure

[acalculatedname]

Originally, I had a different plan for my Week 13 entry, but I quickly figured out that it would get too weird and/or would not have the desired result.

Comments

[halfshellvenus]

Mine wasn't too badly mangled, though it's interesting that there was an implied gender switch in changing from 'wallet' to 'purse.'

I'm surprised at your former student. Not that she was a ruthless plagiarizer (I think you've written about her before), but that she would expect a coherent enough result from translate-in/translate-out that she would just submit that! I still think fondly of a record album owned by the first radio station where I worked, that suffered from this effect. The music was described as the suite from Bartok's "The Wonderful Tangerine," because the in-out translator did not realize that the Mandarin in the original title was a Chinese person and not a piece of fruit. :O

I went to the pond, leaving close enough to my swing. He followed me lost.
This one is my favorite. Completely surreal!

[acalculatedname]

I follow at least two different language-destroying bots on Twitter (the JanusNode "official" account and the justifiably infamous @horse_ebooks). So, maybe, I'm a bit of a connoisseur. Yours actually had an unusually high proportion of mangle-gold. "the fact that two Canadians and southern borders are usually tolerated" - I love this with AND without the following "dollars in cash."

Yeah, I've mentioned this same story before. I couldn't remember if it was in a comment section or an entry, but it matters not (certainly not now). "The Wonderful Tangerine" is absolutely wonderful. Right up there with the famous Yamaha electric-piano manual from the late 60s that clearly instructs the user to "fuck the legs into the base."

[halfshellvenus]

I follow at least two different language-destroying bots
That sounds INCREDIBLY tempting!

the fact that two Canadians and southern borders are usually tolerated
It's true, that is not at all what the original said. Only two Canadians? And southern borders? And they are tolerated rather than being tolerANT?

This is the problem of reading your own selection. Since that's last week's entry, I know what it should say, and it's messing with the recognition of what the translation actually does say.

[acalculatedname]

Yeah, good point. I was the only one not subjected to the head-asplode, so I hadn't thought about that.

My overall favorite is definitely what became of porn_this_way's snippet of genius in multi-translation.

[acalculatedname]

Also, I have been doing occasional experiments with this kinda stuff for over ten years and Goog Translate is actually getting a lot better, to a scary degree. Time was when just one "run" of from-English-and-back in Babelfish (or GT) would yield positively unrecognizable / non-parse-able gobbledywhatzit. I may not be able to use it to write lyrics any more at this rate!